


a terrible emptiness, reaching up for me

by irishais



Category: Final Fantasy XV, Final Fantasy XV: Kingsglaive, Kingsglaive
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-19
Updated: 2019-10-19
Packaged: 2020-12-24 02:57:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 781
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21092264
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/irishais/pseuds/irishais
Summary: What you want to see is not always what you get. Nyx Ulric, and a ghost.





	a terrible emptiness, reaching up for me

**Author's Note:**

  * For [celestialdelegate](https://archiveofourown.org/users/celestialdelegate/gifts).

Sometimes, a ghost is only what you want to see. 

(he sits there in the most shadowed corner of the backyard, his sister’s body in his arms-- she isn’t dead yet, but she will be, she will be, even he knows this much despite the panicked words that slip from his mouth, _ breathe, breathe, look at me, just stay with me, Selena, p l e a s e--) _

He sees her in the barracks one time, long enough for her dark hair and the flight of her smile to make his heart break all over again, until Crowe slams shut her locker, laughing about something as she yanks a clean shirt over her head. She catches him staring, and demands to know what he’s looking at, or if he wants to take her out to dinner first. 

He throws something back, something he doesn’t even remember, but it’s enough to bring him back to this reality, and maybe he’s just getting too good at this coping thing. 

(there’s blood on his hand. there’s so much goddamned blood, and they won’t stop, they won’t give him a minute just to find a stream or a sink or a puddle on the ground to wipe it away with, the last of his sister drying to reddish-brown streaks on his skin. 

i have to go back, he begs, before Insomnian troops load him into a van with the other refugees, i have to bury my family.)

She is there when he is sitting at home, looking at nothing or the television or the corkboard with all his memories of Galahd pinned up like arrows pointing the way home, she sits on his kitchen counter and stares back, swinging her legs in a bored rhythm, but her heels make no echo when they bang against the cabinets. 

_ you can’t save me_, her gaze tells him, pinning him in that chair for what feels like an eternity, _ you can’t save me. _

Fire flares up in his palm, extinguished, flares up again. There is a scorch mark left by the time it’s all over, when she fades away and he can move again, out of the creaky old recliner with a bad spring that squeals under every sudden movement. Coat, keys, wallet-- out the door, slamming it shut behind him. 

How can one room be haunted?

He finds the others at the bar, he drinks until Libertus has to guide him on unsteady feet back to his apartment, not nearly as drunk and the only person Nyx trusts to put the key in the lock for him, to dump him in his bed and wrestle off his boots. 

It isn’t the first time. It’s not the last. 

He sees her, when he closes his eyes, and begs her to leave him alone. 

_ you can’t save me_, Selena whispers, with a cold kiss on his brow, phantom hands on his cheeks. 

(she tells him how much she loves him, and how sorry she is, and that it hurts so much, nyx, why does it hurt so much, and her blood runs sticky-hot between his fingers, staining the white top with the cartoon coeurl that she wears-- _ why am i so cold, nyx? _

he doesn’t know, he can’t explain it, the whole thing is so fucking _ unfair_.)

He sleeps like the dead, buried in his blanket like earth cast over a corpse, heavy suffocating _ dark_, and wakes up with mouth dry as a forest-fire aftermath, late morning light streaming into the one window with the curtains still wide open. Dust motes dance in the sunbeams that threaten to blind him; he scours the specks for any trace of his sister, anything to hint that she was ever there, ever more than just a trick of the eye.

(it is ten minutes, maybe more, maybe less. he will never be sure, only that he must leave his sister to rest under the shadow of a tree, eyes vacant dark, nameless dark. he wears more blood than she must have still slowing in her veins; his blade is the only thing that feels real at all in his hand, and even later, he will have no memory of how it got so thoroughly drenched in red, only that none of it is his until a field medic is pulling glass shards from his skin, commenting that he's lucky to be alive.

is he? is he?)

"...Selena?" 

Croaked out into the daylight hours, it sounds insane to his own ears, but he still strains for a whisper, a breath, a sound. 

Nothing. 

(Sometimes, a ghost is only what you want to see, and sometimes, you have no choice in it at all.)


End file.
